Team Lead

Zheng Cai

Associate Professor (tenured)
Principle Investigator of MUST
Deputy Chair of Department of Astronomy
Director of the Deep Space Technology Center
Tsinghua University

Prof. Zheng Cai is an astronomer with broad interests in galaxy ecosystem, Lyman alpha nebula, QSOs, AI application in astronomy, and instrumentation. He has built a sample of most massive protoclusters in the early Universe (MAMMOTH project), identified a large sample of enormous Lyman alpha nebulae (ELANe). Recently, with JWST, ALMA, MUSE and KCWI, Zheng Cai's team has quantified the heavy element of the gas around galaxies, finding theortical simulations could underestimate the metallicity of the circumgalactic gas. These finding also confirm that the metal-enriched recycling inflow is crucial for the formation of high-z massive galaxies. Further, he is the principle investigator (PI) and project manager of the new generation spectroscopic telescope MUST, which is under active construction.

Zheng Cai got his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2015 (advisor: Xiaohui Fan), and conducted postdoc studies at University of California at Santa Cruz from 2015 to 2019, holding the title of NASA Hubble + IMPS Fellow (contact: Jason X. Prochaska). From 2019, he joined Department of Astronomy, Tsinghua University. He is the deputy chair of the Department of Astronomy, Director of the Deep Space Technology Center at Tsinghua University. He won Xplore prize and excellent teacher award. He also starred in "The Great Learning", an inspiring documentary film.